


Three Lies Immortals Tell Themselves (And One Truth)

by Penelope_Writes (aubreyli)



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Highlander: The Series, Merlin (TV), Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: 3+1 Things, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Multifandom Crossover, especially for immortals, somewhat maudlin thoughts on love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 19:42:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6127990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aubreyli/pseuds/Penelope_Writes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love is difficult for everyone; for immortals, it's even more so:</p><p>Three lies immortals tell themselves about love, and one truth.  As heard by Magnus Bane, throughout the years of his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Lies Immortals Tell Themselves (And One Truth)

**Author's Note:**

> As always, endless thanks to the peerless Brizzbee, in this case for both the prompt (Three lies and one truth) and for the beta. All errors are my own.

**_The first lie:_ **

“True love never dies,” he tells her, as he drapes the necklace around her slender neck.  Clad only in her moon-soaked hair, she looks like a Greek statue, Aphrodite freed from her marble prison to pay visit to him in his bed.    

“Never is a long time, even for love,” she replies, tilting her head back to gaze at him, an enigmatic smile on her exquisite face.  Everything about her is enigmatic – the coy flash of her eyes beneath her dark lashes; the elegant dance of her long-fingered hands; the riddles and half-truths that spill from her lush mouth.  Secrets within secrets, his beautiful, bewitching Camille, and he would need no less than an eternity to uncover all of her mysteries.

Luckily for him, that’s precisely how long he has.  “What is time, for creatures like us?” he murmurs, running a hand down her body, hearing her gasp as he strokes between her legs.

“Are you promising me forever, Magnus?” She grips his hand to still it, and turns to face him.  There is a strange sadness in her eyes.  Camille frequently looks sad, but it tends to be a calculated, artistic tragedy, designed to enflame the white knight that sleeps in the breasts of most ordinary men.  This sadness looks almost… hopeful.

“Unto the ending of the world,” he says, and bends to kiss her soft, intoxicating mouth.  “Until the stars burn up in the sky and all is dust and we are reduced to living in a hovel and dining on rats.”

She bursts into laughter.  “ _Rats?_ Oh, to still have _rats_ at the end of the world!”

“One can work wonders with rats, provided one has some creativity,” he says, with false indignation.  “Rat confit, rat pie, stewed rat, roasted rat—”

She hits him with a pillow, still laughing, loud and brash and unladylike.  He falls back onto the bed, pulls her on top of him, giggling, and kisses her again.

(He’ll always remember her like this, even after their love has soured and shriveled to nothing, even after her death.  He will never forgive her, but he’ll always remember her like this.)

* * *

  ** _The second lie:_ **

“I’m all right,” Adam slurs, with the overconfidence of the extremely drunk.  “I knew—it’s not like I didn’t _know_ she was going to die.”

Magnus nods.  “That is the downside to loving mortals.”  He frowns at Adam’s eight empty beer bottles – Egyptian Stella, because Adam is a self-proclaimed traditionalist – until they slide off the table and hop soundlessly to the recycling bin.  “You could try one of your own kind; or at least, another immortal.”

Adam shakes his head.  “Immortals change after a while, warp into something… else.  Or they don’t, and they stay _exactly_ the same.”  His voice chokes a little on the end of that sentence, and when he looks up, his eyes are haunted.  “Either way, it makes for a messy break-up.”

Magnus can relate.  Even a century later, the memory of Camille still stings.  “Well, they say time heals all wounds.”

“Oh sure,” Adam says, seeming to jolt out of his fit of melancholy.  “I mean, the first one is the _worst,_ the absolute worst, but then after that…” He waves his hand, and accidentally hits himself in the face.  “After a while, they all kind of just… blur together, you know?  You get used to it.”

Adam would be more convincing, Magnus thinks sardonically, if Magnus didn’t know about the business with the Methuselah Stone a while back.  Or if Magnus had met him in, say, a bar, and not an open field in Wales, clutching a woman’s dress and shouting obscenities at a raging thunderstorm.  His name had been Benjamin then.

“In any case,” Adam continues, “it’s worth it.  It’s still better than the alternative.”

“And what’s that?”

Adam points a wavering finger at Magnus.  It ends up hovering just over his left shoulder.  “The alternative… is unthinkable.”

Magnus thinks about _his_ first, all those centuries ago, and everyone since, and how each of them had, in their own way, taken a sliver of his heart with them when they’d left.  He thinks about his latest, his golden-voiced Etta, who had taken his breath away the first time they’d danced.  Etta, who had looked at him like he was a stranger, the last time they spoke.   

There hasn’t been anyone since Etta, though, so perhaps he’s finally run out of slivers to give.  He’s not sure whether to be relieved or horrified by that prospect.

(Years later – though not nearly enough years – when Alexander breathes his last, Magnus will remember this conversation and think: _Oh, I didn’t realize I still had this much left to lose._ )

* * *

**_The third lie:_ **

“—and that’s how I ended up feeding him rat,” Merlin finishes, barely coherent from laughter.  “Al-although, he fed me rat _first,_ so really, the whole thing was his fault.”

“Definitely a prince among men,” Magnus agrees, chuckling into his drink.  It’s rare that he comes across another immortal at all these days, and rarer still to find one who’s managed to keep his sense of humor.

“He _was,_ though, he really was!”  Merlin’s eyes glow briefly gold, and his glass refills itself with the same sweet-smelling ale that he’s been having all evening.  “Well, he was usually a giant clotpole, always thought he could just flex his muscles or bat his pretty blue eyes, and everyone would fall over themselves for him.  But he was also _such_ a good man.”

“He must be, if he’s got someone like you waiting for him, after all this time.”  Magnus grins at him, only half-heartedly flirting.  Merlin’s lovely, high cheekbones and milk-white skin tinted almost amber in the dim light of the bar that Merlin insists on calling a ‘tavern.’  He’s got the dark hair and blue eyes that are Magnus’s favorite combination, but Magnus isn’t into people who are so obviously still hung up on their previous lovers. ( _“Pot, kettle,” Alec’s voice murmurs, in familiar deadpan._ )

Merlin shrugs, a strangely inelegant gesture for someone as old and powerful as he is.  “It’s our destiny,” he says, with a resigned sort of weariness, as though he’s so used to the burden of those words that he no longer registers their weight.  “We’re bound together, Arthur and me.  Two sides of the same coin.”

Magnus wonders if Merlin has figured out yet that those two sides never meet face-to-face.  The faint, sad smile tugging at his lips tells Magnus that he at least has some idea.  “You must love him very much,” Magnus says, gently.

“I do.  I always will, I think.  I’ve tried to forget, but every detail of him is engraved on my heart.”  Merlin closes his eyes, lost in memory so vast that even Magnus can barely fathom it.  “I can still see him: tall and strong.  Eyes as golden as his hair.  Dressed in chainmail and plate armor under a red tunic emblazoned with a rearing golden dragon.”  He shakes his head, smile widening as he opens his eyes again.  “I used to hate that armor.  He had to drag me out of bed every morning to get me to polish that damned thing.”

Magnus smiles back, fingers tight on his glass, heart loud in his chest.  It’s entirely possible that Merlin just made a mistake.  It’s late, and Merlin has an embarrassingly low alcohol tolerance for an immortal warlock.  “Sounds fun,” he says.

(He rushes home that day.  A writing pad and pen fly into his hands the moment he stumbles out of the portal.  He sits down at his desk, and writes out everything he can remember about Alexander Lightwood.  There’s no organization, no order – the memory of their first meeting jostles for line space alongside a detailed description of his arrow-callused hands; their wedding dovetails into their adoption of Max, who had been in their wedding as their ring-bearer (Magnus fills two whole pages describing how seriously Max had taken that position, how he’d cradled their rings in his palms as carefully as if he had been holding a newborn baby bird).  He writes and writes and writes, using a dictation spell when the cramp in his hand is too much to ignore.  His chest aches, his throat swells, his eyes sting with tears, and he pushes it all away until he’s finished, until every little bit of Alexander has been squeezed out of him, onto the paper.  So that even if – _when,_ he knows, with a sickening surety – his memory erodes, Alexander will still be preserved, indelible, eternal.

Then he puts down his pen, drops his head in his hands, and weeps and weeps and weeps.)

* * *

**_The truth:_ **

She makes him coffee, real coffee, ground from beans.  It’s an adorably archaic treat, served in a setting that was considered “retro” even when she first got it.  But, Magnus supposes, that’s one of the benefits of having a time machine.

“How old are you now?” he asks.

She glances up from her pouring.  “You’ve gotten rude in your old age, to ask a woman that,” she says, her sharp tone belied by the amusement curving her lips.

She’s very pretty, brimming with intelligence and full of fire, but perhaps he is getting old after all, to feel no echo of heat inside him, no stirring of desire.  Or perhaps because compared to the supernova that was his Alexander, everyone else is a mere, dim star.  “Only because I’m certain that any woman as beautiful as you would be proud of her age.”

“Oh, flattery, good choice,” she says, grinning in earnest now.  It lights up her face, making her even prettier.  “I’m not really keeping count, but I’d say, somewhere around two hundred years?”

“Kept your accent all that time?”

She shrugs.  “You can take the girl out of Blackpool.”  She slides over his cup of coffee and pulls up a stool across from him.

“Thank you,” he says, taking a sip.  “And how are you finding immortality, Clara Oswald?”

She tilts her head, considering.  “It’s a bit different for me, I think, since I’m really just frozen in time.  Me says the worst part about her immortality was that the future felt like staring into a yawning abyss.  I know where I’m going.  I know how my story ends.”

“That sounds sad.”

“Because there’s an ending?”  She gives him a skeptical look.  “Everything ends.  Doesn’t make it sad.”

“Endings aren’t sad?” Magnus asks, thoughts drifting helplessly to Alexander’s final moments, how the half second between his one heartbeat and his last had been enough to splinter Magnus’s entire world.

“Of course endings are sad,” she says, quietly and very kindly.  “But a story isn’t any less beautiful, or less happy, just because it ends.”

He looks at her – her small, round face, slightly upturned nose, large eyes deep with age and memory.  He takes a breath, and finds that he feels lighter, somehow, as if his lungs have discovered a new way to breathe.  “Thank you,” he says. “May I tell _you_ a story, Clara?”

“I love stories,” she replies, with that quicksilver grin again.  “Is it sad?”

Magnus smiles, and lets himself remember ratty sweaters, strong callused hands, clear luminous eyes that looked at him first with suspicion, then acceptance, then love, love, love.  “No,” he says.  “But it is long; might take some telling.”

She takes an exaggerated look around.  “Well, good thing we’re in a time machine.”

“Indeed,” he agrees, and begins.  “Once upon a time, there was a boy…”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I ought to apologize for the cryptic nature of this fic; sorry, occasionally, I get a little too indulgent. Please see below for clarification:
> 
> The first lie is that true love lasts forever, with Magnus and Camille. The line, "true love never dies," is taken from the canonical inscription on the back of the necklace.
> 
> The second lie is that heartbreak gets easier the more you experience it, with Magnus and Methos (Highlander TV series), whose current alias is Adam Pierson. In this moment of his timeline, he's just lost his mortal wife, Alexa Bond. The line "the alternative is unthinkable" comes from the episode "Timeless."
> 
> The third lie is that you'll remember your loved ones forever, with Magnus and Merlin (Merlin BBC). In the series, Arthur's eyes are blue, not gold. Those of you familiar with Merlin will also note three other inconsistencies: Merlin feeds Arthur rat first, the Pendragon dragon is crouching, not rearing, and Merlin is usually the one who drags Arthur out of bed.
> 
> The truth is precisely what Clara says. :) The line "you can take the girl out of Blackpool" comes from the episode "Robot of Sherwood" and "between his one heartbeat and the last" is paraphrased from the episode "Heaven Sent."


End file.
